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[Illustration: Osmond carrying off Duke Richard.]
_REVISED FROM THE FRENCH OF F. BERNARD AND ORIGINAL CHAPTERS ADDED._
PUBLISHED BY Messrs. Charles Scribner & Co., 654 BROADWAY, NEW YORK.
Each one volume 12mo. Price per volume, $1.50.
_Titles of Books._ _No. of Illustrations_
_The above works sent to any address, post paid, upon receipt of the price by the publishers._
Twelve Priests saved by Geoffroy St. Hilaire 236
Giovanni Arrivabene, Ugoni, and Scalvini 262
III. I then tore them up into long bands, 29
V. Escape of Mary, Queen of Scots, from Loch Leven Castle, 44
VI. “Hush!” said the man, “keep quiet, they are still there,” 48
VII. She lifted the lid of the chest, and her master leaped out safe and sound, 62
VIII. He let himself drop into the sea, 78
IX. They grew very angry at my rudeness, 88
X. I was obliged to support myself with one arm, 92
XI. My foot got stuck, and the sentinel seized it, 127
XII. Trenck escaping with Lieutenant Schell, 138
XIII. The first grenadier I knocked down, 155
XIV. I heard the sound of a door being unbolted, 174
XV. I told him to be very careful not to spill the sauce, 186
XVII. The monk clung to my waistband, 202
XVIII. I told him I was going to bury him, 213
XIX. I saw on the parapet the soldiers of the grand round, 224
XXI. The woodman pulled out a knife and did so, 239
XXIII. I held my handkerchief to my eyes, 258
XXIV. They fell exhausted to the ground, 264
XXV. The sight of the seal was sufficient, 278
XXVI. Osmond carrying off Duke Richard, _Frontispiece_.
Aristomenes, the Messenian general, fighting at the head of his troops against very superior numbers of the Lacedemonians, commanded by the two kings of Sparta, received a severe blow on the head from a stone, and fell insensible and to all appearance dead. He was taken prisoner, with fifty of his soldiers, and dragged to Sparta, where the Lacedemonians condemned them all to be thrown into the Cœada, a hideous gulf formed by a fissure in the earth, in whose depths already lay the bones of hundreds of criminals who had been put to death. The barbarous sentence was actually carried out; and Aristomenes, with all his surviving soldiers, was hurled into the gulf. The latter perished to a man in the fall; but their general, on this as on so many other occasions, was saved--as the historian Pausanias has it, by the favour of a god. The most enthusiastic chroniclers of his exploits say that an eagle flying towards him sustained his body on its extended wings, and thus bore him unharmed to the bottom of the ravine. A happy chance revealed to him a means of egress from this dismal prison. When he reached the bottom, he lay for some time on the ground, wrapped in his mantle, and in momentary expectation of death. He scarcely stirred from this position for two days; on the third day of his entombment, however, he heard a noise, and uncovering his face, saw a fox creeping along in the gloom towards a heap of corpses. Judging from this that there must be an opening in the ravine, he waited until the animal approached him, and then seized its leg with one hand, thrust his mantle into its mouth with the other when it turned to bite, and suffered himself to be dragged through the passages of his subterranean prison. They came at last to an opening just large enough to give a passage to the fox and to admit a feeble ray of light into the cavern. The animal bounded forward into the daylight, and disappeared as soon as Aristomenes let go his hold, leaving the captive general to follow after he had enlarged the opening with his hands. This escape of Aristomenes was considered a manifest proof of the favour and protection of the gods. (_Pausanias: Description of Greece_, bk. iv., ch. xviii.)